I’m finding myself filled lately with a host of meandering but interconnected or overlapping feelings and thoughts. It struck me as quite humorous ( and for no particular reason) this evening that my blog roll expands another link or two, each time I sign in. The order is simply alphabetic; certainly some form of categorization would better organize it. But to do that, wouldn’t it (and I) have to have a more definitive purpose?
Blogging, as a journal, represents an effort to attempt a reasonably honest self-reflection, in both the significant and the mundane. If, as a journal, it is really to reflect back an occasional, useful insight, then I don’t necessarily get to choose the insights it reflects, especially for myself. Rather I have to uncover them, if they exist at all.
The choice still always exists for directing what I write about. Putting up the previous post left me thinking quite a bit about why I felt such urgency of emotional connection to an event that will never more than marginally affect me. I’m as comfortable now as I am likely to expect to be, with my own gender identification and the options I have already for its expression.
My present age, the particulars of my personal health, and the crossing legal complexities of dual continent residency/citizenship present limitations that might even prove beneficial in limiting any personal impact of the APA announcement even further. I’ve noted (I think) elsewhere, that I accept the limitation of possibilities as a kind of creative path in themselves. But, at least in terms of this emotional connection, the desire to be anarchistic, as an expression of creativity plays no part in my emotional response.
I do not especially want to be an activist at this stage in my life. Having grown up actively as a hippie, I expected the assumed inexhaustible energy of inspired youth to be the only necessity for achieving change. I learned to the contrary, through a number of experiences. With present hindsight, I see that energy as often misguided, misdirected, and misused. Sometimes even deliberately manipulated and abused, even by myself, as an accessory to the agendas of others.
I have little of the excited passion, hopeful anticipation, or sustained rebellious anger that I had 35+ years ago. Too much energy in activism, then and now, can be simply eaten up by malicious, vindictive infighting serving individual ego and persona that have no connection to commonality of stated purpose. The obsession for endlessly debating the semantics of defining labels of identity in trans politics certainly has zero politically viable potential.
There is however, an air of utter contemptuousness, both intellectual and ethical, that offends both intelligence and conscience in the APA announced appointment of two outrageously self-promoting, extremely biased individuals with controversial and questionable scientific credentials to a work group that is responsible for developing professional guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of gender conditions. Conditions for which, they personally advocate, suppression as an actual preferred method of treatment. Neither accepts gender variance itself as manifestations of distinct psychological or medical disorders. Instead they are categorized as either an unacknowledged homosexual pathology or compulsive and self-obsessive sexual addiction.
My activist impulses now are generally confined to and satisfied by, the unending task of sorting out and changing of my personal contributions to existing social and environmental problems. The political viability is limited, but to a more accessible certainty, of one me less, one me more. My ability to be proactive is not conditional to the necessity of a specific validating label. There can be strength in numbers, if the numbers actually signify a meaningful collective. Harmony perhaps, not cacophony or echoes.
My emotional engagement through offense to my intellect or conscience is selfish and egotistical. Perhaps its just guilt that makes me feel I don’t want my own experience to be solely for my own gratification. I do know I haven’t arrived at this point of feeling “comfortable” with my gender on my own. I found this comfort also because of the efforts of many known and unknown others: Surprised by it from anticipated enemies, assured of it from long accepting friends. My present comfort is a benefit collectively bestowed, a privileged I have been enabled to enjoy.
It should really be everyone’s inherent right instead.
Maybe that’s a good enough reason to want to kick someones ass.
